The U.S.’s secret surveillance court is unaccountable to the public and not “inclined to promote justice,” Microsoft’s top lawyer said Tuesday.

General counsel Brad Smith said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which reviews applications and appeals involving U.S. government data-collection efforts in the name of national security, acts unlike most other courts because “only one side gets to tell its story.” The surveillance court also effectively creates law “that the American public is not permitted to read,” Smith said Wednesday in a speech at the Brookings Institution.

The 35-year-old court was cast into the spotlight following revelations about National Security Agency’s data-collection programs. The court’s decisions and most documents submitted to the court are secret, which Smith said made it tough for those opposing the government’s data demands to have a fair hearing.

“This is not an approach inclined to promote justice,” Smith said, as he showed an image of what he implied was a government document before the surveillance court, with all text blacked out. Microsoft is among the U.S. tech firms that previously previously have sued the government to reveal more details about secret U.S. surveillance demands.

A spokesman for the surveillance court said numerous opinions have been posted publicly on a new website.

“It’s hard to be a litigant before this court,” Smith said. “Do we not deserve at least the right to read what the government is arguing?”

The Obama administration earlier this year proposed creating a panel of privacy advocates to offer the surveillance court input in significant cases. Some critics have said the White House proposal was vague and hard to implement, and Smith said the idea of court advocates “has not yet been embraced by Congress.”

Smith’s critique of the foreign-surveillance court is part of mounting criticism by U.S. companies of government-surveillance efforts after a year of disclosures about the breadth of U.S. programs to glean information from phone calls, emails and other digital data.

Smith said he and other tech executives were particularly troubled by reports last year about the NSA siphoning digital data as it traveled between firms’ computer centers overseas, without permission of the tech companies.

“We knew what we were being asked to do,” Smith said. “We didn’t know what was being done without our knowledge, and we still do not know all of that even today.”

In his speech, Smith also discussed Microsoft’s decision not to participate in government efforts during the George W. Bush administration to collect vast amounts of “metadata” about domestic Internet and email use.

A 2009 draft NSA inspector general report, disclosed last year, referred to a “Company F” as among Internet companies that resisted government bulk-records requests in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Smith said Tuesday that Company F was Microsoft.

Smith said the company “thought hard” about how to deal with the government’s data demands. He said he recalled in 2002 telling Steve Ballmer, then Microsoft’s CEO, “how the decisions we would make would need to stand the test of time.”

Note: This post has been revised to add material, and to specify that Smith spoke Tuesday. An earlier version said he spoke Wednesday.